Black Currant Juice
This Black Currant Juice drink comes from Connecticut, where I picked it up in a local grocery store. It's a dark juice, and very strong smell, a lot like concord grape, and similar almost to wine. The taste is very much like a dark purple grape juice. There are slight tannins, but overall it's a very smooth drink.
It only has 3 ingredients: water, black currant juice (from concentrate), and fructose. But it's only 22% juice. How can that be? I'm not sure, maybe that means it's only 22% concentrate, with the water as the majority of the other 78%. If you know how they calculate the percentage of juice, please leave a comment. Regardless, this leads me to imagine that straight-up black currant juice is probably either bitter or sour - which is why cranberry juice is usually sold as a juice blend. The water and sugar really easily cut that though if it's the case, because it's actually very good.
Black currant is a small black fruit very high in antioxidants and vitamins, including Vitamin C. It has four times the Vitamin C of oranges, and twice as many antioxidants as blueberries. I think that qualifies it as a superfruit. It comes from Europe, and is working on making a comeback in the United States where it was banned in the past because of a threat to the logging industry. It is still banned in some states.
The black currant juice I tried was made by Currant Affair. You can visit their website at www.ConnecticutCurrant.com
Chinese Wild Blueberry Juice
This blueberry drink comes from China, and is actually a specialty of Inner Mongolia. It's called Ye Lao Da, which roughly translates to "Very Wild." There's a long story on the label about how the wild blueberries are hand-selected from the primordial forests in the mountains.
This drink is actually more blueberries than blueberry juice. It's deep purple, and has a ton of little blueberries floating in it. These Chinese blueberries aren't exactly the same as the standard North American variety, they're a little bit bigger and look almost like small grapes. Read More >